Editorial

A wide spectrum of faith focuses on learning the languages of original religious scripts, be it Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism or Buddhism. Most of these faiths inspire their followers to know and practice the commandments particularly Islam makes it mandatory to learn Arabic language. As a Hindu community member one needs to learn Sanskrit, as a Muslim one needs to learn Arabic, as a Jew has to learn Hebrew and as most of the followers of Buddhism, Taoism or Shinto religion have to learn their languages of their own religious texts. But, apart from their mother tongues, the followers of the most of the faiths have to learn two other languages — English as an international, academic or trading language and structured programming language or machine language. The latter language (hypertext markup language or HTML) is a must to work globally because technological jobs are available all over the world. It is very heartening for one to be the native speaker of Arabic because they are not required to learn Islamic religious texts. But they have to take the burden of learning English and technological language. So an Arab has to be trilingual at least. Diametrically non-Arab Muslims like Bangladeshis, Malaysians or Turks have to be quadrilingual. Similarly a Hebrew-speaking Jew living in ME has to pick up English and machine languages apart regional language like Arabic. So people in the present globalised world have pressing reasons to be multilingual and very very logically we make the issue as the cover story in the month of February when we sacrificed blood for language.
Hope to return to you soon.